Obama calls for base closures

The Pentagon revived its politically radioactive proposal for a new round of base closures on Wednesday in a budget proposal the White House pitched as a compromise but which quickly reignited old battles with Congress.

The Department of Defense is requesting about $2.4 billion over the next five years for a round of base closures that would start in 2015, with the promise that consolidating the military’s “excess capacity” in real estate would pay dividends over the long term. The department is also asking Congress to slow the growth in personnel costs with a 1 percent pay raise to troops and increases in fees paid for some health care services.

Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s panel on tactical and land forces, argued that military services are “already stretched thin” and that President Barack Obama has an “inability to recognize that the world is not becoming a safer or more stable place. … How much more will the president ask of our military, while simultaneously cutting the resources they need to defend this nation?”

Key Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, remained quiet, perhaps caught between loyalty to the president and worry about the political risks involved with his budget.

The Pentagon and Congress tangled over both BRAC and proposed health care fee increases last year, and lawmakers ultimately rejected the Pentagon’s proposals. House Republicans even convened a pre-emptive hearing last month to declare their opposition to base closures, well before the defense budget submission.

Defense officials argue the ongoing drawdown — leaving the Army and Marine Corps with 100,000 fewer troops by 2017 — as well as the steep increases in personnel costs give them no choice but to continue making their politically unpopular requests to Congress.

“BRAC is a comprehensive and fair tool that allows communities a role in reuse decisions for the property and provides redevelopment assistance,” Hagel said. “There are upfront costs for BRAC, and this budget adds $2.4 billion over the next five years to pay them, but in the long term, there are significant savings.”

Although the Defense Department’s $526 billion spending plan for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 continues the downward tack for Pentagon spending, it requests some $51 billion more than the department may legally receive under the budget cap imposed by sequestration, on the assumption that lawmakers will void that old law and replace it with the budget from Obama.

Such a move would mean about a $100 billion reduction in spending for the Pentagon over the next decade, compared with roughly $500 billion it must absorb across the board under sequestration.

That is almost identical to an offer Obama made to House Speaker John Boehner during last winter’s fiscal cliff crisis, but Boehner and House Republicans rebuffed it. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said the Pentagon’s proposal would only hurt military readiness as it sustains or expands its war on terror.

“Historically, Congress and the White House have both proven to be poor judges of where and how we will have to fight to preserve our liberty. What we can say with certainty is that the fight will come. By levying more cuts on the military, the president has decided that a future generation of Americans won’t have what they need on that day.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, was just as dismissive.